This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Crimean Tatar community in Toronto fears deportations in homeland

The recent invasion is all too similar to events in 1944 which saw the Crimean Tatar population expelled from their homeland under Stalin’s orders.

Filiz Tutku Aydin did her PhD dissertation on the Crimean Tatar diaspora. She's also an ethnic Tatar, one of about 200 living in Toronto who see Crimea as their natural homeland. (Keith Beaty / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Attila Anghel was born in Romania and immigrated to Canada in 1990. Many Crimean Tatars live across Eastern Europe and Central Asia after they were forced out by the Russians. (ZOE MCKNIGHT / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Crimean Tatar flags feature prominently at the May 18 commemoration in Crimea of those who were forced to live in exile or died on the way. (Feliz Tutku Aydin photo / Feliz Tutku Aydin photo)

Rustem Irsay, who runs a print shop in Toronto, returned with his family to Crimea 15 years ago from exile in Uzbekistan. (ZOE MCKNIGHT / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Art by high school student Sanie Irsay inspired by the crisis in her Crimean homeland. (Rustem Irsay photo / Rustem Irsay photo)

Before Soviet troops came for the Crimean Tatars at dawn in May 1944, they first marked their front doors with an X.

The tags made it easy to target the Tatars and load them onto trains headed for Central Asia and Siberia. Thousands of homes were raided. Within two days all 300,000 members of the Muslim Turkic population indigenous to the Black Sea peninsula had vanished from their homeland.

Nearly 50 years would pass and the USSR would collapse before they or their descendants could go home, by then to an autonomous republic in Ukraine.

So when the marks reportedly appeared again, this time on homes the Tatars had struggled to rebuild, the sight was chilling even half a century later and half a world away here in Toronto.

Whether a terrible prank or a threat, the marks were a reminder history could repeat itself now that the region has been annexed by Russia.

Article Continued Below

“The grandmothers have already started to collect their valuables together,” said Filiz Tutku Aydin, a Crimean Tatar who wrote her University of Toronto PhD dissertation on the national identity of her people. “They are expecting a deportation any moment.”

Russian militias arrived in the region in late February and Crimeans voted March 16 — in a referendum dismissed by the West as illegitimate — to secede from Ukraine and join Russia.

The crisis has now spread elsewhere. Armed pro-Russian militias have seized a number of government buildings in eastern Ukraine and on Sunday , Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov said in a televised address the interim government would use the army to prevent Russian forces from moving in elsewhere in the country. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the latest Russian aggression similar to attacks in Crimea.

Crimeans know this story all too well. Aydin’s own ancestors fled to Turkey after Catherine the Great defeated the Ottoman Empire in Crimea in 1783. But like many Tatars, Aydin’s family made a special effort to preserve the culture and she speaks the language at home in Toronto with her husband and two young children. She hears the painful echoes of 1944 even from here.

“Crimean Tatar people are shocked and so distressed, and so are the diaspora. Even me. I have almost no ties there. I’ve been there one time. But every morning I wake up and ask, ‘Is it a bad dream? Is it a bad dream?’ ”

Among the blue and yellow Ukrainian flags waving during a recent protest in front of Toronto’s Russian consulate, just three bore the Tatars’ yellow tamga, or seal. About 100 families came to the city in the early 1990s and there are about 200 Tatars here now, Aydin said. Most came via Romania and Bulgaria. Direct ties to Crimea are rare, but attachment to the homeland is a defining feature of Tatar identity.

“It’s a very nostalgic kind of culture. The mythical homeland is so much the core of the identity,” she said.

“It’s so mythologized in people’s minds,” she said of the land that, because of its shape, is sometimes described as a diamond or the Green Island.

There has been a strong resistance to the Russian occupation of the peninsula. A well-known Tatar was one of the first official fatalities.

“Canada is appalled by reports of the torture and death of Tatar activist Reshat Ametov in the Crimean region of Ukraine,” Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said on March 18.

“Mr. Ametov, who had been missing from Simferopol since March 3, 2014, after he attended a protest against Russian military intimidation, was found dead today in Belogorsk. According to a report from Human Rights Watch, his body bore signs of torture.”

Despite the risks, Rustem Irsay’s parents, in their 70s, and his siblings want to stay in Crimea. They returned there in the mid-90s after decades in exile in Uzbekistan. With Tatar land confiscated and Russians living in Tatar homes, many like Irsay’s parents built a new life brick by brick — literally — with little help.

Irsay, 40, was a doctor in Uzbekistan but now runs a design and print shop on Davenport Rd. He moved here in 2007, but with his wife and 17-year-old daughter, used to visit Crimea almost yearly. He fears his outspoken criticism of Russia and appearance at the near-weekly protests will prevent him from ever going back.

With the conversion to the Russian currency in Crimea, Irsay’s father can’t draw his pension and his bank account is frozen. There are fears Tatars won’t be welcome in Russian-run hospitals. Some family members are worried about keeping their public service jobs. Irsay has asked his parents to fly here to safety but they do not want to accept a Russian passport.

“They don’t want to leave. And they don’t have any place to go,” Irsay said. “Ukrainians can go to Ukraine and Russians can go to Russia.”

There are no official threats against Tatars in Crimea — yet. Just suspicions and fears, Irsay said.

His daughter, Sanie, mounted an exhibition at her high school, the Etobicoke School of the Arts, inspired by recent events. Besides paintings and prints, it also includes an installation made of an old Kalashnikov rifle shipping trunk.

During the 1944 deportations, nearly half the population died and Soviet authorities worked to eradicate the Tatar history of Crimea, which is why many Tatars consider themselves victims of genocide. The language is considered “severely endangered” by the United Nations.

That’s something Attila Anghel, 40, knows well. He works in the hospitality industry but is a student of history. He’s been in Canada since 1990 but speaks Crimean Tatar at home with his wife and 3-year-old son, Kublai , named after the Mongol emperor to whom Tatars trace their ancestry.

“The past reflects on the future. If we don’t know the past we will be doomed to repeat it,” he said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have (director Steven) Spielberg or Hollywood to show the world our holocaust, but the general Tatar population is afraid they will wake up to another deportation by Putin.”

Russian President Valdimir Putin’s agenda, Anghel said, is clear. “It’s no friendly intention. After years of living peacefully among Slavs in Crimea, he said the risk of persecution for the Tatar minority — just over 10 per cent of Crimea’s population — is now high. Most boycotted the secession referendum but resistance has mostly been peaceful so far.

“The Tatar population are being bullied by the Russian militia . . . it just takes a small spark right now to ignite a bloodshed. It will be inevitable,” Anghel said.

In Toronto, there’s no formal Tatar organization, though some are starting to come together. There’s no one mosque they frequent, and some are more secular than others. But recently there’s been a move to reach out.

“In dire times, we find each other,” Anghel said.

Correction - April 14, 2014: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled Filiz Tutku Aydin's given name.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com